Stanford women’s basketball: Baylor gets its (small) comeuppance

Like Stanford fans, many of the supporters of Baylor’s opponents no doubt hope that the NCAA penalties against the national champion Lady Bears for the coaching staff’s illegal calls and text messages to recruits will be substantial.

Don’t bet on it.

The men’s program of coach Scott Drew was found to have been made rampant illegal calls and texts, leading one to wonder whether athletic director Ian McCaw‘s compliance people have any idea what they’re doing or whether McCaw is minding the trains in the first place.

Nobody expects the Lady Baylor to be stripped of their national championship or any of their 40 wins during the unbeaten season built on the intimidating presence of Brittney Griner.

Maybe the NCAA will suspend coach Kim Mulkey for a few Big 12 games next season. So far Baylor’s self-imposed penalties against her are as follows, according to ESPN.com’s Jason King, who broke the story:

Mulkey will be prohibited from recruiting off-campus for the summer recruiting period, basically the month of July. This probably isn’t much of a penalty because the assistants handle most of the recruiting during that period anyway.

The women’s program lost two of its 15 scholarship for 2011-12. Wow, that really hurt, didn’t it?

The NCAA’s committee on infractions could merely accept Baylor’s penalties and close the case. Or it could impose further scholarship reductions and suspend Mulkey and Drew for games next season.

Baylor has not covered itself in glory with its reponse to the ESPN.com story. All it said Monday was that it had been involved in a three-year investigation with the NCAA over impermissible phone calls and text messages. It didn’t even say which sports were involved. Nor would the NCAA comment on the case, saying it’s still under review.

Between the men’s and the women’s basketball programs, according to ESPN.com, there were 1,200 such calls and text messages dating back to 2008. It’s a little hard to chalk up 1,200 instances of cheating to confusion over the rules.

Assuming the report is true, you have to wonder why both programs were docked scholarships for the current academic year without issuing a statement about the case or without anybody finding out about it until now.

According to ESPN.com, the NCAA started its probe of Baylor in 2008, Griner’s senior year of high school. She and her father reported contacts with Baylor that were potentially impermissible.

Two months later, it was reported that Baylor’s men’s program went similarly overboard in recruiting Shawn Williams Jr., who signed with Texas and eventually wound up at SMU.

Wow, the wheels of justice turn very slowly for Baylor and the NCAA, don’t they? Here we are four years later, just finding out about the cheating.

The ESPN.com story said the basketball programs used Teleflip, a conversion software program that enables a coach to send an e-mail from their phone to the cell phone of a prospect or the prospect’s coach or parent. The coaches claim a former Baylor compliance officer said erroneously that those messages don’t count as texts.

That’s the ticket: Pin the blame on a former employee and let the current culprits weather the storm.

You’d think that a school that went through the embarassment and depravity of Dave Bliss would do a better job of accepting responsibility for its sins. The difference was that Bliss tried to foist the blame not on a former employeee but on a jailed player. In college basketball’s most sordid case in many years, Bliss and his staff were found to have given illegal tuition payments and to have withheld information on failed drug tests to players. Even worse, Bliss was secretly recorded while trying to cover up his misdeeds by portraying one player (Carlton Dotson) who had murdered another (Patrick Dennehy) as being a drug dealer.

The latest phone/text case has already dragged on too long. The NCAA and Baylor should tell us what happened.